Many health benefit plan providers and retail pharmacies now offer their clients the option of obtaining prescription drugs by mail. Mail order pharmacies ship prescription drugs to a client's home so the client is not required to visit a pharmacy and to fill a prescription in person. For clients with chronic conditions or other conditions that require maintenance drugs, a mail order prescription program is an attractive benefit because it is more convenient for the clients and typically less expensive than obtaining prescription drugs at a neighborhood pharmacy. For many drugs, clients have the option of purchasing a drug fill in a 60-day or even a 90-day supply at a lower cost than a 30-day supply.
Many mail order pharmacies use automated systems and dispensing lines to process and ship a high volume of prescriptions on a daily basis. Depending upon how the technology is implemented and deployed within a mail order pharmacy, a substantial number of steps in the fulfillment process may be automated and the need for human intervention minimized. Mail order pharmacies operating in the US, like their neighborhood counterparts, must be licensed in a state and are subject to numerous rules and regulations established by the licensing state's board of pharmacy. One common requirement is that a pharmacy, whether a neighborhood pharmacy or a mail order pharmacy, must meet pharmacist verification for certain prescriptions. For automated mail order pharmacies, pharmacist verification is a manual step that must be integrated into the automated fulfillment process.
In many automated pharmacy systems, pharmaceutical verification is performed by capturing and displaying at a workstation the verification data that the pharmacist needs to review and verify a prescription order. The verification data typically includes prescribed drug data from the order (e.g., drug name, strength, dosage form, and quantity prescribed) and a digital image of a drug that has been dispensed into a vial for shipment to the patient. The digital images are typically acquired from one or more digital camera systems that are integrated into an automated dispensing line. The pharmacist reviews the prescription order data and image of the vial contents to confirm the proper drug has been added to the vial to be dispensed to the patient.
Although state boards of pharmacy typically do not require pharmacist verification for every prescription filled by a mail order pharmacy, the automated system must capture a digital image of every prescription that is filled so a record of the order and vial contents can be retrieved in the event questions about processing of the order arise. When pharmacist verification is required, the digital image of the vial contents along with the prescription order data allows the pharmacist to confirm the proper drug has been dispensed. Therefore, it is important for the mail order pharmacy to incorporate an image capture process into the automated prescription dispensing line.
A pharmaceutical verification camera system is an important component of an automated prescription dispensing system but frequently such camera systems are also a bottleneck in the dispensing system. The capsules and pills that are dispensed vary in size, color, and shape, and therefore, require different camera settings to capture a clear image. Furthermore, the appearance of the capsules and pills within a vial can vary based on the volume of the drug added to the vial. To capture a clear image of every filled vial, automated dispensing systems typically rely on the camera's autofocus and automated color balancing features to determine the appropriate settings (e.g., focus, white balance, and exposure time) for the image capture.
The camera's automated features are part of an open-loop system that relies completely on internal routines to converge on and deliver an image. The time required to change the auto-settings as well as capture multiple images can take several seconds. A camera host computer typically waits for a period of time while the camera's embedded controller optimizes the image. At the end of this arbitrary period, the software assumes it has captured a valid image. The pass/fail result in this context is only based on the existence of the image. There are no quality checks in place to confirm an image of sufficient quality has been captured. The camera host saves the image to the archive and updates the control system so the vial may progress through the pharmacy, but the quality of the image is unknown.
In many systems, the vials are queued for image processing simply because the camera cannot keep up with the volume of vials that are processed by the system. Therefore, there is a need for an improved pharmaceutical verification camera system that reduces or eliminates bottlenecks in an automated dispensing system.